The head of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs told a congressional subcommittee Thursday that illicit marijuana farms run by Chinese organized crime have overrun the state and pose risks to U.S. military installations. 

Director Donnie Anderson said the scale of the problem is unlike anything he’s seen in his 34-year career. He testified that the value of Oklahoma’s illicit marijuana exports was around $153 billion last year, a figure derived from state data. Oklahoma also accounted for 66% of the DEA’s nationwide marijuana seizures in 2024, compared to just 15% in California, 3% in Maine, and smaller shares in other states, according to a recent report. 

Anderson added that investigators have found foreign-run farms worryingly close to critical infrastructure. He said the Department of Defense is investigating “suspicious activity” at a marijuana farm run by Chinese nationals near a U.S. military ammunition plant in McAlester that manufactures advanced weapons and houses about one-third of the nation’s ammunition stockpile. 

The rampant exploitation of immigrant workers in the industry was another theme in his testimony.

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At the hearing, witnesses and Democratic and Republican lawmakers called for the federal government to take stronger action against illicit marijuana farms — operations that have spread nationwide and have been found in large numbers in Oklahoma. 

The two-hour session was led by Rep. Josh Brecheen, R-Oklahoma, who chairs the Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

“We are holding this hearing today because we’ve enabled these foreign organizations with potential links to the Chinese government to build up a sophisticated network throughout the United States,” Brecheen said at the hearing. The groups operate “at scale and with sophistication, crossing state and national lines, beyond the normal capabilities state and local law enforcement can combat,” he said.

Several witnesses and lawmakers cited reporting last year by The Frontier and ProPublica that revealed how Chinese criminal groups took advantage of weak laws in Oklahoma to dominate the global black market for marijuana. The reporting also documented the groups’ use of forced labor and their ties to the Chinese state.

“The billions of dollars generated by illegal marijuana are not staying in the United States. They help finance China’s Belt and Road Initiative — a global strategy designed

to expand China’s influence as America pulls back on foreign aid,” said Subcommittee Ranking Member Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Michigan, a state where illegal marijuana operations have been recently identified. “Illegal marijuana proceeds also fund Mexican cartels that traffic deadly fentanyl into our communities. And the black market is riddled with human trafficking, human smuggling, and forced labor.”

To confront the issue, Christopher Urben, a former senior DEA official, urged Congress to create a federally funded interagency task force modeled on the campaigns that dismantled Italian mafias in the 1980s and 90s.

“Federal funding, coordination, and authority combined with state and local resources is desperately needed,” said Urben. “​​I would ask that you fully fund a task force to attack these networks.” 

The task of cracking down on marijuana farms has primarily fallen to state and local authorities, which generally only have the resources to raid farms one-by-one and arrest their managers. But Urben said farm managers are only low-level operators that are easily replaced by the criminal organizations that employ them.

The purpose of the task force would be to target out-of-state and foreign ringleaders using federal racketeering, money laundering, and organized crime charges. It would include translators for regional Chinese dialects, data scientists, counterintelligence specialists, money to recruit confidential sources, and financial crimes investigators. 

Urben and Anderson also called for Congress to look into restricting WeChat, an encrypted Chinese messaging and payment platform that investigators say is frequently used for money laundering. 

Thanedar criticized the Trump administration’s reported decision to shutter the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force program, which has coordinated multi-agency cases against international organized crime for decades, including investigations of Chinese groups in Oklahoma. The Justice Department has begun replacing it with Homeland Security Task Forces that emphasize immigration enforcement, according to media reports.

Thanedar said he is also concerned that the Trump administration’s recent deployment of federal law enforcement agents to fight street crime in American cities has diverted resources from investigations of transnational organized crime.

Paul J. Larkin, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, suggested Congress expand federal review of agricultural land purchases. This approach mirrors Sen. James Lankford’s proposed SOIL Act, which would require federal authorities to review land deals for national security concerns. The bill passed the Senate in 2023 but was not signed into law. Lankford reintroduced the proposal in March.

Larkin also called on prosecutors to target the Chinese government itself. There is evidence that Chinese officials are aware of organized criminal activity, he told the panel, and cited The Frontier and ProPublica’s reporting on ties between criminal groups in Oklahoma and Chinese officials in his written remarks.

“As the Supreme Court of the United States has made clear, ‘[t]he doctrine of willful blindness is well established in criminal law,’ as is the principle that the government may establish proof of a conspiracy entirely through circumstantial evidence, which appears to be in ample supply on this point,” he wrote.